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television

My TV schedule

The big news is my sphere of pop culture is that “Dollhouse” has been cancelled. I think it makes Joss Whedon look like a sucker for going back to FOX after they cancelled “Firefly” on him, but at least we got more than more one season and a chance for closure. At the end of the first season, we were worried that FOX would cancel the show after only one season, so perhaps this entire season is a gift. It’s not the end of the world, but it is disappointing. FOX couldn’t have expected much in ratings by airing it on Friday nights; even my group of friends no longer watches it when it first airs, especially since it’s so convenient to watch it online.

On the plus side, we still have “30 Rock.” In its 4th season, the show has hit its mid-life stage. The characters are familiar, the same gags are repeated, and episode setups are getting predictable. I’m okay with that. I love the first season too much to ever expect anything better, and it’s just a sitcom. As long as I keep laughing, the DVDs will continue to be instant purchases.

My last regular TV has been the “Clone Wars” CG cartoon show. If anyone remembers back to the release of “Star Wars: Episode 3,” George Lucas talked about wanting to do Star Wars TV shows, and this is it. There’s no overarching structure as a classic myth or dramatic theme of galactic proportion, but it’s what I imagine old sci-fi serials were like. They’re cheap, exciting, quick mini-arcs with all of your favorite flashy weapons and villains who cackle and barely escape capture at the end of each episode.

I’m okay with soon only having an hour of TV a week to keep me entertained, however, because I need to catch up on movies. Lunch and dinner conversations have far too many movie allusions that I am only barely familiar with, and although “Top Gun” may not be a classic, I feel I should have seen the “volleyball scene.” I was working on puzzles yesterday where movie trivia was very important, and although I think I’m familiar with a lot of movies, I haven’t actually seen a lot of them. My list of movies to watch is long and goes up with each dinner conversation, but I still have movies from 2 summers ago that I have loaded but not watched.

I think I’ll get around to them after I’m done watching “Avatar.”

One reply on “My TV schedule”

In the last third of the 20th century, an interesting literacy of “pop culture” emerged, with the development of mass media communications, i.e. radio and television.

We’re now seeing the dismantling of this tradition with the technology moving on to “any place, any time”. In some respects, this is like a suburbanization of media, because we get to choose our own neighbourhoods, at the risk of a self-sealing loop on content.

I still like to go to small music clubs (most frequently jazz) for that in-person shared experience. I haven’t gone to a movie theatre in over a year, but just saw 1.5 films on the plane back and forth to NYC. DY and I have been thinking about going to a concert, but we’ve already seen that band multiple times, and the ticket prices of $70-$150 are a turnoff.

I find reading the newspaper every day — the hardcopy one, not the electronic content for which I have RSS feeds — “sweeps in” content that takes me out of my cocoon.

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